The State of the Union?

Well I have to say the title of this entry is apt. The state of the union is, in fact, the question under consideration in two, possibly three states. As I sit here at my lonely keyboard, Indiana’s democratic reps are holed up in, of all places, Urbana Illinois according to the LA Times, where I write. So that leads me to the question, where are Wisconsin’s fourteen democratic senators? Probably across Right Street in Champaign IL for the duration. Now I don’t know what you may think of collective bargaining associations, AKA unions. Me personally, I have little enough experience with them. I’ve read enough about them to realize that they are as fallible and as susceptible to corruption as any other entity of human beings, but having said that, I suppose I support the notion of union in principle. I recall the grad student strike of 2009 in which I took part I might add. It was a just cause with legitimate grievances, and the resolution attained would’ve been out of the question had a strong and well organized union not been active. So as someone who has personally seen what unions can do up close and personally when they act rightly, I suppose I’d have to say I’d prefer to have the union and not need its resources, than to find myself in a situation where I wish I’d had a union to hand and not have one.

                Now I’m a native son of the southern US, and while I am not southern in all my ways and thought patterns, my background leads me to a few choice and naturally sardonic observations. It seems to me that these people in the mid-west don’t know what to do with their money. That is, they have no idea how to hang on to it. Illinois, for example, is one of the most historically corrupt states in the union. State and local corruption on the widest scale dates back as far as the drawing of the state’s borders; hint:  Illinois doesn’t have frontage on Lake Michigan because the cartographers came by it honestly. Most of Illinois’s recent governors are behind bars, and I wonder whether Blogoyovich has joined them yet. Probably not. The state has been running its budget on empty for years, and currently owes state entities, such as, oh, let’s see, the University of Illinois, hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in back budgetary allotments. As an aside, I remember a mass mail sent out to the U of I community at the beginning of the academic year by our vice chancellor. It was one of those things that tried to be upbeat as he told us all the wonderful things U of I is doing to “combat current financial difficulties.” I couldn’t help noting that one of those measures was to offload nearly a hundred tenured faculty and just as many support staff using terms such as “voluntary separation incentive,” and “early retirement incentive.” Read between the lines for yourselves. Now that brings me to Wisconsin. Admittedly, I’ve never set foot in Wisconsin, though were I to do so it’d merely be to visit a cheese shop. I do, however, have a good friend in Madison, Hi Amy, and so I follow the developments there with something more than passing interest. First of all, as a matter of principle, if sixty thousand people take to the streets of your capital, whatever the reason, you’ve got some cause to consider what they have to say. Wisconsin is not a large state, and sixty thousand people swarming the streets of the state capital is not a force that can, or ought, to be ignored. Now without deconstructing the minutiae of the governor’s reasoning, Wisconsin has a fiscal problem. Translation, cheese and beer just aren’t doing it for revenue. Governor Scot Walker wants to pass a bill that, among other things, would force state workers to pay half their pension costs and a substantial portion of their own health care coverage. Ok as far as it goes, which is to say I won’t quibble with numbers and percentages. The alarming part of the bill is that it would strip state workers of their rights to bargain collectively. This is known as union busting, though that term is déclassé. It is this provision of the bill, the part that would deprive workers of the rights to bargain with the state purse string holders, that is causing tens of thousands of people to go to the streets.

                Now let’s think about Indiana. Indiana deserves a paragraph because as yet, the goings on in Indianapolis haven’t gotten as much press as those in Madison. They are, nevertheless, as significant. Now I’m not as clear on the basis for the protests in Indianapolis, because again, information is harder to find, but it has to do with giving companies in that state under collective bargaining terms the right to prefer hiring non-union members over union applicants. Admittedly, this is not as obvious a powder keg as what’s happening in Madison, but it’s caused enough of a firestorm that the democratic representatives, all but three according to the Indianapolis Star, to leave the state in protest. Governor Mitch Daniels isn’t saying crap, though I note with dismay that state house speaker Brian Bosma was considering having state police round up the absent legislators. No wonder they fled across the border. I originally wondered whether it’d occurred to any of them to just, I don’t know, vote ‘nay’ on the bill and have done with it? Probably. My guess is they don’t have enough votes to kill it on the state house floor (this applies to both Indiana and Wisconsin) but they do have sufficient power to see to it that no quorum is reached and thus, no vote taken. Good for them.

                Now I said back at the start of all this that I am a southern man in many ways, and now it’s time to tell you what that has to do with the price of tea in China, or more aptly, the price of labor in Wisconsin. I note with interest that Nashville isn’t currently filled with angry protesters. So far as I know, people aren’t swarming the streets of Montgomery, Raleigh, Atlanta, Jackson or even, God forbid, Little-Rock in angry protest of states’ fiscal decisions. That’s because, whatever else the south’s failings might be, to put it succinctly, it ain’t broke, or not as, anyway. There are two types of brokenness as demonstrated by current events, broke, and flat-ass broke. Broke is what you are as a state when you need a new budget bill, and pass one. E.g. consider Tennessee in the summer of 03 (I think it was 2003 anyway), when state institutions came within a day of closing their doors for lack of money. I was there. They stayed open. So far as I know, nothing like that’s recurred in my home state. Flat-ass broke is what you get when you’re from the mid-west, apparently. When it comes to money management, Illinois and Wisconsin could learn a few things from Arkansas and Mississippi, states who, while being the butt of every other southern state’s worst jokes, still manage to avoid governor Walker’s and governor Quinn’s sets of difficulties. People crack jokes about southern states keeping their money buried in mason jars rather than in investments, but mason jars have this in their favor. When you need to dig them up, they’re still there. Unlike the budget allotments in, say, Wisconsin’s and Illinois’s state treasuries. People of the north could apply this principle if they tried, you think? Next time, I’ll ponder the state of the nation and the world. Have a good night.

Food?

As you can guess from the title, this one’s about … well, food. I’ve noticed a phenomenon among highly educated people as I accumulate more time behind the walls of the university, and it concerns their food. There seems to be a correlation between the level of education attained and the avoidance of what most of us would call normal fare in favor of exotic, or in many cases, downright disgusting comestibles. I’ve observed a trend towards what I call yuppie fare, and it is the nature of yuppie fare as well as the causes for seeking it out that I wish to explore.

                First, what do I mean by yuppie fare. Yuppy fare is hereby defined as food eaten with an accompanying sense of pretention, or an accompanying scorn for plainer fare. For example,  go to the Bread Company on Oregon in Champaign and attempt to order a grilled cheese. What you will get is a sandwich that does indeed have melted cheese on it; however, last time I checked, the preparers felt it necessary to put either tomatoes or black olives on the sandwich, other toppings available upon request. Now since when did this simple comfort food, which is not healthy and is not generally supposed to be so (not that I have anything against healthful foods, but everything in its place if you please) need to take on the attributes of yuppiedom? Don’t like that example? Let me offer a few more. Go to the Golden Roast in Knoxville Tennessee and order a tuna salad sandwich. You won’t get one. You will get an open-faced half pita, first of all. In this pita there will indeed be tuna fish, but you will in it mixed with a distressing admixture of sliced apples, chopped nuts and several other vegetables and fruits which, at first glance, do not appear to belong to a good old tuna salad sandwich, or wrap, or pita, or … whatever it is. At this same coffee shop you can order gazpacho in summer. Now if you like gazpacho, fine, but most Americans, especially those like myself who were born south of Mason and Dickson’s line, do not like, or in academy speak, disprefer cold vegetable soup, which is essentially what the stuff is, a chilled tomato-based broth filled with raw veggies. Hence, cold vegetable soup. Nothing, in short, that a microwave couldn’t fix. Now before anyone charges me with not liking dishes of foreign origin such as gazpacho, I should put out there that I enjoy a wide variety of ethnic foods on a regular basis, so keep quiet. As a further example, let’s consider hummus. Now I personally like hummus. But I like it as it is intended to be eaten. That is to say, as a ground puree of chickpeas that is consumed with small slices of warm pita bread. This is a snack, appetizer or in some places a breakfast throughout the Middle East. Yet at several places in Champaign, as well as in other college towns such as Knoxville, hummus has become a sandwich topping. I have seen perfectly good hamburgers and chicken sandwiches topped with “cheese and a generous portion of humas”’ note the misspelling, according to one menu. Hummus is not, repeat not, a sandwich topping. But places like Knoxville’s Copper Seller pride themselves on it. Let me include one final illustrative example. The Chicago River Hotel is a decent hotel in downtown. I forget its star rating, but it’s prices are low considering where it is, that is, just off the start of Chicago’s magnificent mile. Now then, order a turkey and cheese from room service. What might you expect. Well it’s an Italian restaurant, so we’ll change the name to a Panini and get on with it. Turkey, cheese, lettuce and tomato, maybe onion and some sort of mayo or some such, right? … almost. The sandwich, as is, comes with turkey, brie cheese, a green apple slice and, I kid you not, cranberry mayonnaise. I’ve tried it. Now is there any reason to do this? As for me, being as well-exposed to food as I am, I didn’t even know cranberry mayo existed, nor would it have occurred to me to put an apple slice on a hot toasted sandwich. But then, if I’m room service and am charging $14 for the sandwich, maybe it would then have occured to me to do so.

                Now I said at the start that I wanted to consider the types of people who regularly order such things as I’ve listed above. I realize that there are exceptions to what I’m going to say, and if you are an exception, it is so noted. My girlfriend, for instance, doesn’t go in for this sort of food, but she did enjoy the turkey sandwich, unfortunately. I am talking about the greater majority of people I’ve observed eating this crap. Remember I said there was a correlation between education and food choice? I’ve noticed that it’s mostly grad students and professors, mostly in the humanities, who order this swill. For instance, you’ll never see barbecue or fried chicken at an academic function, ever. If you did, I’d enjoy them a lot more than I do. Lastly, you tend to see a disproportionate number of vegetarians in the ranks of the humanities. Why? Well there are a lot of reasons for becoming a vegetarian, but the one I have the least patience for is the social protest. There are people who don’t like how our meat-production industries kill, clean, sing about, package, price and otherwise handle meats intended for human consumption. So, to protest these practices, they go veggie on you. I’ll never forget my encounter with a grad student in another department, who engaged me in a lengthy discussion, trying her hardest to convince me of the moral rightness of her position. This tendency to attach ethical or moral concerns to vegetarianism is the bit that really causes me to lose patience with this type of person. Her concluding remark was, “as intelligent as you are, if you continue to eat meat, then that tells me you’re either willfully uninformed, or there’s something morally and ethically lacking in your character, because how could you knowingly eat meat, being fully aware of what happened to that animal.” My response? “One bite at a time.”

                So, I launch my own protest. I do this in full knowledge of what I am demographically speaking, namely a highly educated person pursuing an advanced degree at a research 1 institution. Ok, having established my bonifieds as far as my entrée into yuppiedom is concerned, here’s my pledge. You will not find this crap, either the aforementioned crap or the myriad dishes and wanabee foods I haven’t listed, in my home or at any function over which I have charge. When I, in future, invite fellow faculty to our home for a get-together, real food will be served, including meats. Real drinks will be served, not simply wines and sparkling water, and it will taste good. It will taste good, not because it satisfies the elitist nature of the academy’s food choices, but because it will actually … be … good. Take five. And thanks.

come on in

So just what does belong in one’s initial blog post? I suppose it’s reasonable to explain why I’m doing this. The answer is because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Ergo, I’m doing it. Journaling has always been hard for me, though I suppose having a public forum, even a forum that is only visited by my friends and a select few interested parties, would be sufficient motivation for keeping up a blog. That being said, it is a public forum, and not every aspect of my life will be on display. So if it’s personal and I don’t mention it, or mention it only briefly, kindly don’t dissect it in public view. I can always remove your comments you know. :P! We’ll see. Who knows, maybe it’ll be bigger than I expect. But a blind doctoral student ought to be able to find a few things to say every now and again. And that leads me to the subject of … subject matter.

I make no claims that this blog is dedicated to any one subject. My posts will be as varied as my interests. For a list of those, see my profile. And then there’s my life, which some find of interest, me most of all. We’ll see. Your comments will be welcome. Having said that, fare warning, I pull no punches. I’ll express my opinions and views as I see them, and if they’re not liked, that’s going to be unfortunate … for the reader, that is. So I suppose I’ll start with the present, the things most relevant.

You know, the problem with human subjects-driven studies is, well, human subjects. I’ve got only 4 participants at the moment, and I’m not even sure I can use two of them. It makes me wish I’d chosen to write a purely theoretical dissertation. At least then all I’d have to do is read and visit archives. Working with people occasionally sucks. But my advisor is hopeful. She seems to be of the opinion that the present recruitment snag is just that, a snag. I’ll operate on that assumption until I have reason to do otherwise. What worries me much more is the slump in the German job market. Had an email from Cori, a prof in the department, asking us to be thinking about and showing our support for a German teacher at a local high school, an excellent teacher with very high pass rates and very successful students, who’s district contract isn’t being renewed. That, combined with the fact that German departments are downsizing across the country. I still haven’t forgotten that USC’s is closed, and Iowa’s is being folded into the World Languages and Literatures Department, or whatever they’re calling it. And the upside? I’m told that my specializations, applied linguistics, foreign language pedagogy, translation, are the areas left where the job market is at least lukewarm. It’s rather scary though. I don’t want to be standing in the social security line, PhD in hand, reapplying for benefits. It won’t come to that. I’m doing my utmost to see to it that it does not. Still, the thought that it may come to that keeps me from mounting my high horse too terribly often. I’ve heard it said there should be a God-shaped hole in our lives in which he works, or something to that effect, and that’s one of mine. He’s going to have to do it, because it’ll be a minor miracle if/when it works out. Just being realistic. Now you can all remind me that I should’ve studied Zulu. And maybe you’d have a point.

In other news, the ring is more than half paid for. Yes, ring. This may be news to a few of you, so here goes. Nicole just left here after a two-month-long visit. One of the upsides to her being forced, by deplorable circumstances, to switch schools, was and is her semester off. So she spent some significant time here. You can’t stay with someone that long and not learn a substantial amount about them. Enough so that a ring is a reasonable investment. So, I invested. No, we won’t be tying the knot right away. I’m not that unwise. But I want that ring on her hand in any case. Being somewhat old fashioned, I won’t call it an engagement until she’s wearing it, and it’ll be May or June before that happens. I’m done playing around though. It’s time to take this relationship to the next level.

As for the ring, I must say picking it out was challenging. I knew she didn’t care what it was, which left the decisions up to me. I knew, firstly, that I didn’t want to buy a $3000-4000 rock. Why should I? Our culture, particularly the diamond companies and chain jewelry conglomerates, have sucked us into the idea that your engagement ring ought to be expensive as all get out. I disagree. I wanted something that would be pricy enough for me to have to work on paying for it, but not so pricy as to be absurd. And I refused to buy it on credit. The second thing I knew was that I did not, repeat not, want a diamond of any kind, no diamond center stone, no diamond accents, none of it. You see, we Americans have been taught that a diamond is practically the only acceptable stone. Again, I disagree. I went for a modest sapphire. She will be pleased. My godparents seem to approve of this step, and I admit I find that comforting. She’s the first Christian I’d ever been with, and that makes Nicole radically different in many respects from others I’ve dated. Not to detract from anyone else’s good qualities, but in thinking about who I ought to marry, it seemed right to go for someone who holds certain values, namely values having to do with the place of the family versus the career and the sanctity of marriage versus the easy split. In this culture those ideals seem only to be found in more conservative Christians anymore. We’ve lost those values as a culture, I’m sad to say. Our divorce statistics are proof positive of the trend.

Now I have to take her to Tennessee. She’s spoken to my family; as far-flung as they are, that’s the most reasonable thing we could’ve hoped for. And she’s met Alfred and Dee, I’m glad to say, who, in turn, have taken their report of her to Amelia, I hope. But I want to take her to Memphis and introduce her to the Connollys, to Clarksville, to introduce her to my own mother, and to Nashville, because that’s where the happenings are. I’ve met her family, most of them anyway. … That’s another post. I miss the siblings though, all of them, and Nana too.

Right then. I’m off to bed. I think my next post will be something only a few will find interesting, but my buddy Aaron Rushton inspired it. Let me work on that one. Good night.